July 14, 2009

It has been nearly impossible to curb my journalistic instincts during my short family break in Sri Lanka. Nearly two months after Colombo declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 16, the country remains on visible alert with heavily armed soldiers and policemen in Colombo and elsewhere. One can expect to be pulled over by troops for a quick identity check at random intervals.

Yesterday on my way to a meeting I chose to travel by a rickshaw (trishaw if you are a true blue Sri Lankan) and was stopped twice. Both times I showed my Illinois driver's licence to two soldiers barely in their 20s. Both read everything on it but curiously did not bother to match the picture on the card with my face. I suppose the lllinois driver's licence looks impressively authoritative enough.

As I said on the first day of my arrival, there is both triumph and triumphalism in the air in Colombo. You know that when you see "Proud to Be Sri Lankan" T-shirts going on sale. Sri Lanka has become a fascinating case study, particularly after the LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran was captured and declared dead on May 17. It is interesting that the government declared victory before they announced Prabhakaran's death.

May 26, 2009

The celebrations over the total decimation of the Tamil
Tigers in Sri Lanka could be short-lived if the UN Human Rights Council manages
to vote in favor of a special session to investigate charges of war crimes
against Colombo.

"It is hoped that the holding of this special session
will contribute towards the cause of peace", the Council’s president
Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi was quoted as saying in an official press release.
"The Human Rights Council cannot be silent when innocent civilians are
caught up in armed conflicts. The international community must strive to
deliver justice to victims of human rights violations wherever they occur and
ensure that those found guilty of such crimes are held accountable for their
actions", he added.

Colombo has a wholly new perspective on the issue. Dayan
Jayatilleka, Sri Lanka's ambassador and special representative to the UN in
Geneva, was quoted by the IANS’ M R
Narayan Swamy as alleging that a section
of the West had attempted to prevent the military defeat of the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and save at least a section of its leadership.

Jayatilleka went so far as to say that the LTTE enjoyed
patronage in some Western countries.

Sri Lanka had faced intense international pressure to scale
down its military operations against the LTTE given that they were seriously
disrupting civilian life and were often at the cost of human rights. On it part
Colombo argued that enough care was taken to make a distinction between the
separatist guerillas and civilians. Inevitably though, a large number of
civilians died in the operations which eventually eliminated the entire LTTE
leadership, including its feared chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

If the charges of war crimes stick, they could seriously
undermine Sri Lanka’s polity at a time when it is trying to put the 30-year-old
ethnic conflict behind. Colombo can justifiably argue that the world generally
maintained an indifferent silence as the LTTE went about its relentlessly
violent campaign in the past two and half decades that claimed close to 100,000
lives.

May 22, 2009

Rumors and conspiracy theories feed on their propagation. So let me do my bit.

This photograph has been spread virally on the net by someone trying either in jest or in deadly earnest to prove that Tamil Tigers chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran is still alive. There is a large constitutency of Sri Lankan Tamils who believe that contrary to the claims by Colombo Prabhakaran is still "safe and alive."

Admittedly, there is humor in someone watching reports of his own death with a partially disfigured body on television even while holding a copy of a newspaper reporting the story. One can debunk this photograph from various angles but what would be the point of that? That would only lend it legitimacy.

P.S. I know I had promised not to write about the man any more but I could not pass up on this one.

May 19, 2009

I was glad to see my friend M R Narayan Swamy being quoted in the New York Times. Here is what he has to say about Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

"He (Prabhakaran) was fascinated by shootouts in Westerns, according to his biographer, the Indian journalist M.R. Narayan Swamy. "He would take slow steps with a revolver stuck into his shirt, make a sudden turn, whip out the revolver and fire at an imaginary enemy," Mr. Swamy quoted a friend as saying. "He never got tired of it."

MR wrote an excellent biography of Prabhakaran called "Inside an Elusive Mind" in 2001 which pieced together hard to come by nuggets of information about someone who was paranoid about his personal life. I had the pleasure of having commissioned and published that book for my company Literate World.

For someone whose childhood hero was Phantom: “the Ghost who
Walks” it is inevitable that Vellupillai Prabhakaran’s followers are claiming
that he is still alive. A pro-Tamil Tigers website TamilNet has said that he is
“alive and safe.”

S. Pathmanathan, who heads the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam’s International Relations wing, said in a statement, "I wish to
inform the global Tamil community distressed witnessing the final events of the
war that our beloved leader Velupillai Pirapaharan is alive and safe. He will
continue to lead the quest for dignity and freedom for the Tamil people."

Not that it is inconceivable that for a man who outlived
governments and two armies by over a decade and a half could have engineered
his own escape but there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that he is indeed
dead. Unless he has a double who looks exactly like him, the photograph
released by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defense (above) shows he was indeed eliminated.

Looking at the photograph I could not but marvel at the fact
that in the midst of his impending death the 54-year-old Prabhakaran had the
time to shave. He looks quite well turned out. I suppose that’s the kind of
self-assurance that kept him alive for as long as it did. For a brief moment I
considered the morning of the day he was killed. He ought to have known that
when he stepped out that morning there was a distinct chance that he would not
survive. Did he wake up and look in the mirror and say ‘I must shave as I
always do. In case I defy the heaviest odds of my life, I do not want to have shabby
stubble?” Probably not, but that proves the point that men like Prabhakaran
completely exclude their own mortality from their scheme of things.

It is understandable that those who continue to espouse the
Tamil cause beyond his death want to build a mythology around him. It would not
hurt whatever remains of the cause to continue to pretend that he is “safe and
alive.”

Meanwhile, there is a worrisome story out of Toronto, which
has the largest expatriate population of Sri Lankan Tamils outside Sri Lanka.
Gurmukh Singh of the IANS quotes Canadian Tamil Congress leader and spokesman
David Poopalapillai as saying, "Mark my words, this Monday marks the
beginning of the third phase of our struggle for independence. In the first 35
years since Sri Lanka became independent 60 years ago, we waged a peaceful,
Gandhian struggle but achieved nothing.

"In phase two, the LTTE waged an armed struggle for 25
years (till today) and succeeded in globalized our mission. This Monday marks
the beginning of the third and final phase of our struggle to achieve
independence.''

May 18, 2009

M.R. Narayan Swamy, a leading Indian journalist and Sri Lanka expert whose biography of Tamil Tigers chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran I published in 2001, has this obit on the IANS wire.

By M R Narayan Swamy

New Delhi, May 18 (IANS) His first victims were squirrels and birds, and his first weapon a humble catapult. From such beginnings, Velupillai Prabhakaran -- who died ignonominiously Monday -- grew to be the world's most shadowy and ruthless insurgent who at one time lorded over vast areas in Sri Lanka's northeast.

The over 35 years Prabhakaran spent underground building the once unknown Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) into an awesome war and terror machine transformed the Indian Ocean island from an idyllic tourist haven into a bleeding state.

His unforgiving campaign for an independent Tamil Eelam state, to be carved out of the Tamil-majority northeastern province, left nearly 90,000 dead, gave birth to a cult of suicide bombings that shook the world, and cast a long shadow on nearby India.

By the time destiny caught up with Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009, he had acquired legendary notoriety. To critics he was a megalomaniac, one who had turned assassinations into a fine art. To his admirers he was a doughty fighter, unlike Tamil leaders of an earlier era.

Driven by a worldview that Tamils could not live within Sri Lanka because the Sinhalese would never treat them as equals, Prabhakaran decreed that anyone deemed an impediment in his path needed to be done away with.

And he did that with a vengeance that was numbingly brutal, producing dread and even awe.

He had leaders of two countries killed. One was former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated when a woman strapped with explosives blew up in May 1991 while pretending to touch his feet. The other was Sri Lanka's president Ranasinghe Premadasa, torn apart at a 1993 May Day rally by a young male who had infiltrated his house a long time ago.

But none of the attributes of blood and gore that made him so ruthless was evident when he took birth in a simple middle class home in Jaffna, the Tamil heartland, on Nov 26, 1954.

That was when ethnic unrest was starting to engulf Sri Lanka, involving the largely Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the mainly Hindu Tamil minority.

Born to a disciplinarian father, who a Sri Lankan government employee, and a devout mother, Prabhakaran was the youngest of two daughters and two sons, the natural darling of the family.

His early idols were two Indian independence heroes, including Subhas Chandra Bose, who chose gun over Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence. Prabhakaran dropped out of school due to the pull of a nascent Tamil militancy. He fled his home for good in 1972 after a vicious police crackdown.

Prabhakaran's first major act of violence was the gunning down of Jaffna's Tamil mayor in 1975. The LTTE took birth the next year but remained largely unknown till it issued its first press statement in 1978.

Those were dark days for the young Prabhakaran. With the police looking for him and lacking enough hideouts, he would sail stealthily to India's Tamil Nadu state. Money was a problem there too. There were nights when he went hungry.

In a dramatic event, the import of which was then lost, the unknown Prabhakaran was arrested - for the first and last time - in Madras (now Chennai) in May 1982 after trying to kill a rival. But with help from Indian politicians, he got bail and escaped to Sri Lanka to resume his bloody innings.

It was Prabhakaran's ambush of an army patrol in Jaffna in July 1983 that killed 13 soldiers and sparked off terrible anti-Tamil violence, leading to a full-blown insurgency.

Once New Delhi began clandestinely training and arming Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, Prabhakaran shifted to Tamil Nadu and lived there for over three years while the LTTE grew and grew.

From the safety of India, Prabhakaran ordered murderous attacks in Sri Lanka. Even as he fell in love with a Jaffna University student and fathered three children, he set up a clandestine network to feed the LTTE weapons and ammunition from around the world.

Prabhakaran quit India in January 1987. When India and Sri Lanka signed a pact later that year to end Tamil separatism, he appeared to go with it but then audaciously took on the Indian Army deployed in Sri Lanka's northeast.

Prabhakaran killed at will - be they Muslims, perceived foes among Tamils, Sri Lankan leaders or Sinhalese civilians. His suicide bombers were an elite force, whose members had their last supper with him before setting out on their missions.

Even in his bunkers, Prabhakaran was a doting father, cutting cakes on his children's birthdays. He loved good food, ice cream in particular. He had a fetish for cleanliness, was paranoid about his security, and exercised regularly. He was soft spoken. He expected complete loyalty from his band of men and women. Dissenters got no mercy.

As the body count mounted in Sri Lanka, he became uncompromising vis-?-vis his goal of Tamil Eelam. He ruled Jaffna for five years until 1995. By the late 1990s, the LTTE had large parts of the island's north and east under his control.

The LTTE had by then grown into a mammoth, fearsome entity, with the trappings of a de facto state. LTTE offices spawned in numerous countries. Unable to meet its military challenge, Sri Lanka requested Norway to broker peace, leading to a truce in 2002.

But lack of mutual trust and a crippling split in the LTTE in 2004 shattered the peace. In late 2005, Prabhakaran asked Tamils to boycott the presidential polls, leading to the narrow victory of Mahinda Rajapaksa. He believed that a Sinhalese hardliner in office would help rally the Tamils.

It turned out to be his biggest blunder - after Gandhi's 1991 killing.

LTTE provocations led to war in 2006. By 2007, Colombo brought the entire eastern province under its control for the first time in several years. By 2008, better equipped and trained Sri Lankan troops began capturing territory in the north and began killing Prabhakaran's close lieutenants.

Kilinochchi, which was Prabhakaran's de facto capital, fell in January 2009. Just four months later, the man himself lay dead while trying to flee from pursuing soldiers, dropping the curtains on one of the world's longest and bloodiest insurgencies.

(M.R. Narayan Swamy is the author of "Inside An Elusive Mind", the only biography of Prabhakaran.)

May 17, 2009

In the midst of a reported announcement by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that they have "silenced" their guns and ended their armed campaign, there are strong rumors that their elusive chief Vellupillai Prabahakaran has committed suicide. For someone one of whose childhood hero was Phantom "the ghost which walks", it may not be surprising if he has set off the rumors himself.

Taking together both these developments on their face value to be accurate, we might be witnessing a historic example of how a government, unconcerned about the humanitarian costs, can crush one of the world's most efficient guerrilla groups. Sri Lanka has already declared victory after capturing the entire coastline in the country's northeast, effectively blocking escape by sea.

The whereabouts and fate of Prabhakaran have remained undetermined and it is conceivable that he has taken his own life. There were earlier reports that he had instructed his closest aides that in the event that he faced imminent capture his remains should be burnt and all traces destroyed. It is logical to wonder about Prabhakaran after Colombo's capture of the last of the revel-controlled territory. There is no official announcement on that front yet.

It is important for Sri Lanka to have a clear closure on Prabhakaran if it wants to start a new chapter in the island's history. They do not want mythologies built around the Tamil phantom that simply disappeared. That means Colombo has to have a version of habeas corpus on him if they want to claim final victory. As long as there is any likelihood that his followers that he may be alive it can equally keep alive the prospects of the insurgency resurfacing in some form.

If one accepts Sri Lanka's claim that the LTTE is finished, then it opens up possibilities of studying how a small country can neutralize a mortal enemy that defied all the might for over two and half decades. One sobering lesson of the success will be that the fight against an insurrection against state whose core strategy is terror works only by matching the wanton disregard for human suffering and human life that the adversary displays. It is hardly for me to declare the end of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka but in so much as all parties involved seemed to claim or imply that I think its costs will be paid well beyond its celebration.

P.S.: If there is an ever movie made on Prabhakaran Kamal Haasan will be perfect casting.

May 15, 2009

Sri Lanka's apparent success in the ongoing military assault against the Tamil Tigers can be significantly attributed to the induction a wide variety of Chinese weapon systems. Brahma Chellaney, one of India's leading China experts, makes an important point about how Chinese Jian-7 fighter jets, antiaircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons “have played a central role in Sri Lankan military successes against the LTTE.”

It is obvious that India’s largely hands-off policy in Sri Lanka after its disastrous peace keeping engagement between 1987 and 1990 has opened doors for China to step in and play the role of a benefactor. Unlike India, which is constrained by its democratic checks and balances, China has been able to offer a sort of ideology-free economic and military assistance to Sri Lanka of the kind it has given in Africa as well. As long as China is sure of its long-term strategic interests barely disguised as economic engagement it is quite happy helping pliable countries.

In some sense India is in real danger of losing the strategic game in Sri Lanka whose location gives it considerable importance. Since India’s domestic Tamil politics is so inextricably linked with the Sinhala-Tamil conflict it has been difficult for India to play a no-holds barred role in Sri Lanka in recent years. Of course, there is also strong political resistance within Sri Lanka against India’s intimate involvement. Unlike India’s emotionally complex friendship, China offers a detached and utilitarian relationship free from meddling. It is obvious Sri Lanka prefers that for now.

One of the issues that a new government in Delhi will have to deal with a great deal of seriousness is the looming shadow of China over the region.

It is interesting to see how Washington's involvement in seeking a resolution of the conflict Sri Lanka has grown in recent weeks. After President Barack Obama's clearly enunciated position asking the Tamil Tigers to lay down arms and the Sri Lankan government to stop indiscriminate shelling in the country's northeast, it is now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to turn up the heat. She said the U.S. will block a loan of $1.9 billion that Sri Lanka has sought from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) "until there is a resolution of the conflict."

Clinton said the time for considering such a loan was "not appropriate." She is unequivocally linking the release of the loan to Colombo easing up on the military onslaught which has killed thousands of civilians and disrupted the lives of tens of thousands. Obama has warned this is a "catastrophe" in the making unless urgent action is taken now.

Sri Lanka's more than two decades old ethnic conflict barely even figured in the U.S. foreign policy matrix until recently. At a time when the Obama administration is preoccupied with massive economic challenges on the home front and military challenges in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, it is unusual that it has got involved in Sri Lanka as well. So far Colombo has defied international pressure and kept up its operations against the Tamil Tigers. It said yesterday that the Tamil rebels will be eliminated in the next 48 hours. If Sri Lanka is as close to eliminating its gravest existential challenge it is highly unlikely that it will pay any attention to what Washington has to say.